The Best Brazilian Steak BBQ After Dark in Rio de Janeiro Brazil

Starting out today at the Flamingo area of Rio and showing me around Tom and Marcela from Eat Rio Tours. What are we doing today? We are gonna eat, we're gonna drink, we're gonna have everything authentic, unique to Brazil, delicious. Let's do this. So this is a very local traditional neighborhood market and it's only here once a week and there's everything from fruits, to vegetables, to fish, to food stalls you can eat at and there's tons of foods that frankly I never seen before. Nothing more refreshing and delicious than freshly squeezed sugar cane juice. So good. So basically we squeeze the lime here, we add the sugar cane. I was wrong. Only thing more refreshing, sugar cane juice with some lime juice in there. Freshly made pastel. This thing has pipe and hot gooey cheese inside but it's so gooey it went to the bottom of the pastry. Outside it's so flaky and light. This is really interesting. So apparently the blisters on the pastel, the little bumps, that's important. They add a little bit of liquor to get these little blisters and it makes it even more fluffy and airy and crusty and flaky. So if you are ever in Brazil and you got a pastel that's all smooth and look like it went through a photo filter, that's no good. You want the bumps. Wow. Biggest pine nuts I've ever seen in my life. Bom dia. Bom dia. Wow, look at the size of a Brazilian avocado. That's a soursop. Yeah, here in Brazil we call this graviola but yeah, soursop, most of the rest of South America they call this guanabana. And this is the biggest one I've ever seen. Wow. Amazing. Oh, it's so tropical smelling. Look at her bag. So you have a cutting board, butcher knife, a fruit knife, whatever. Oh yeah. Wait. What else? Paper towels. Oh my gosh. Hey, what else? A what? Hammer. I don't even want to know what that's for. Actually, I do. I do want to know what that's for. She is the Mary Poppins of Brazil. So look at the difference between a regular soursop and a soursop's granddaddy. Oh, what is this? I don't know what that is. It's a machiche. It's a vegetable typical from the northeast of Brazil. And this one, do you recognize this one? What is that? I don't know what that is. This one is a fruit from the Amazon, from the north, called cupuaçu. Cupuaçu is in the same family as cacao. Oh, cacao, yeah. So these are actually like cousins. You can make chocolate from this. So here in Brazil, we call chocolate chocolate. If you make it with cupuaçu, it's called cupolache. So chocolate has a cousin. No one knows that. It's true to know that. This looks like a bad tangerine, right? This is actually, it's a citrus fruit that goes by a bunch of different names. Even here in Brazil, there's about six different names for this. You hear it called limão galego, which means like the Galician lime. Limão capeto, which means devil lime. It smells like a like a cross between a tangerine and lime. Wow, it tastes like a mix between a tangerine and lime, but the feels like the lime is 100% runs the relationship there. Machiche, I get a lot of people looking at this and they think maybe it's related to a rambutan or something like that. When we cut this open, it becomes clear what it is. Cucumber. This is a cucumber. You may know this as lemon pepper. Here we call it lemon pepper. Just a sprinkle. My first machiche. I'm so confused. It tastes pretty much exactly like a very intensely flavored cucumber. The skin is actually very refreshing. That pepper is really good. So yeah, this is cupuaçu. It's got a hard shell, so you never quite know what you're going to get inside with these. Occasionally, you break them open and they're all moldy, which is disappointing. One of the sort of tricks to tell whether it's moldy or not is you scrape it and you do that. You see how it's got a light color there. It's kind of green. That's a good sign. So we'll break it. It looks kind of like a durian. It feels kind of like a durian, like a little very custardy cupuaçu. Oh my gosh, this is really, really complicated. The pulp is really fleshy. Some parts of it are a little custardy. It's sour. It's a little bitter. Wow. When it's riper, it comes out whole like that. This is better. More ripe. Okay, the bitterness is gone. It's very, very aromatic and fragrant, but as you get closer and closer to the pit, it's really sour. It's very interesting. I like that. The texture, everything is very, so much going on in your mouth when you first try it. The texture itself is actually very reminiscent of a cacao, but the cacao is way sweeter. The cacao is, this is something I had just recently. And do you eat the... Don't bite it, just sort of suck the... I've just been eating the... Oh really? It's just like extreme dark chocolate. Yeah, pretty bitter. But the outside is very reminiscent. Have you ever had mingle It tastes like a mingle. It's very similar. Yeah, you can just crunch on the beans. It's basically just cacao beans. Super bitter though. Graviola aka soursop. So soursop and custard apple kind of look similar on the outside. Soursop, the fruit is more fleshy texture, way more acidic and sour. Super, super juicy though. Here we call this fruta de concha, which means fruit of the count. You'll sometimes hear that called sugar apple. Another word for And that's where this comes from. This fruit here is atemoya. It's a cross between the ata and the much larger chirimoya, which you'll get in places like Peru, all the way throughout to Mexico. I think it's the best fruit in the whole family. It's firm, it's fleshy, it's really creamy. This one, atemoya. Like a custard apple would be custardy and juicy. This one is just like, it's firm but still retains that great flavor. Similar flavors, way different texture. Palmer mango. Almost zero fiber to this. All juice, delicious, soft flesh. Again, that fiber stuff that usually is not great in mango, doesn't really have it. Cashew fruit. Look at this thing just dripping with juice. It's one of the best things I've ever had. Never knew you could eat this until I came to Brazil. I think it's for sure sweet juice, but don't try to eat that cashew on top of the fruit. That's still poisonous. Lunch is going to be unya jikanage, which is like sort of a fritter. The outside is fried cassava, making up the crunchy shell. Inside minced crab meat with different types of spices, a little bit of veg. This is really interesting. This is called a takaka. It's a traditional Amazonian soup. The inside, the vegetable is called jambu. It's a vegetable grown in the Amazon. And the ingredient that makes it yellow is called chukupi, which is also from cassava, but from a very poisonous cassava. A lot of people died trying to eat this. I don't know why they can't just eat something else, but hey, made it happen. We're able to eat this cassava now. And they usually put this in the soup, what kind of looks like something the Ghostbusters would catch. It's called goma, and you put it in the soup and it sinks to the bottom and you just stir it around. But I was warned to try the soup without it first. So apparently you're not supposed to use a spoon, just you're supposed to take this beautiful bowl and then just sip it and eat it with a little wooden fork thing. Wow, I didn't expect this. Remember that fruit I had earlier that was so sour, it kind of contorted my face. This tastes like a soup made from that. It's like extremely sour citrusy soup. Inside there's some just some salted shrimp. And let's just try the veg. The vegetable is really crunchy and also what's really peculiar is it kind of has the same effects as a peppercorn because my tongue, my lips are feeling numb from the vegetable. That's really interesting. I do like really, really sour soup. This might be two levels sourer than what I typically would have. So this probably goes really well with the soup. And when you eat this, make sure you grab it from the pointy end because this thing, it's a crab claw. So you're grabbing the claw right now. Oh, this is really good. And I was right. After you bite of this, it makes you want to take a sip of this. This is a great combo. Super savory. You taste some garlic, some smokiness from the peppers. The crab meat is really tender. The outside is very lightly fried and airy. It's got a very nice subtle crunch. Inside, chewy cassava. And look at all that crab meat that's inside. And this is their chili sauce. Add some of this chili sauce to it. Wow, that will 100% light you up. I definitely went a bit liberal with this chili sauce. I mean, my tongue's on fire. My lips are on fire. This mixed with the veggie that kind of numbs you, it really is kind of like in a way eating Sichuan food because it's spicy and nummy. I like a lot of chilies. I love that burn. That's a really nice burn. And again, look how much crab meat is in here. And this does go so well with this. I would say definitely order these things together. I'm going to mix in some of the gomo with my soup. Kind of looks like the stuff that created the Ninja Turtles. So that goes into the soup and mix it around. I couldn't really taste it. I think I need more of this stuff. Wow, it tastes a little garlicky and kind of enhances the numminess of the soup. I'm just going to go ahead and add all this in. It definitely changes the texture a little bit. I haven't had one of these shrimps yet. Oh, that's really good. Oh, that's really good. You got to eat the soup with the salted shrimp. It's very savory and it definitely has this old seafood umaminess to it that balances out really well with the soup. You put all three of these together, bite of this, soup, a prawn. It's a really nice balance of textures and flavors. Traditional food from the Amazons. I like it. Something else I had to try here. This is the pure version of an acai bowl. I think I've had acai bowl once in my life, but it originated here in Brazil in the Amazons and this is it. No sugar added, nothing. Pure acai. I mean, it definitely tastes like it's great for me. It better be great for me because eat a big bowl of this. It's a little grainy. When it hits the back of your tongue, that's bitter. And the reason it tastes a little bitter and not sweet at all, it's missing this. This is guaraná. It's a spice that's used to sweeten acai bowls. And what you do is add a bit of this in there. Not too much, a little bit. Stir that in. Night and day. This is pretty darn good now. Wow, I never had the original version, well the pure version of acai before. It's much sweeter now. I still taste a slight bit of bitterness on the parts that doesn't have a lot of that syrup. Yeah, I feel like it really needs this. You can also add some crunchy tapioca. Definitely adding more syrup. Oh, so much better. So much better. Crunchy tapioca, nice and puffy. Goes to show, cassava is such a vital ingredient here in Brazil, especially in the Amazons. And most foods will contain some form of cassava. I mean, initially it tasted like the healthiest thing in the world. This is actually a really good breakfast. I think my tongue and teeth are purple. Finally, some ice cream. This is Brazil nut ice cream with cobuaçu on top. Cobuaçu was the fruit that Tom had to break open with a hammer that tasted very complex, blend of flavors. And now I'm gonna try it in a different form. Wow, that tastes nothing like that. This is a very nutty, creamy, but very nutty ice cream. Stuffed full of Brazil nuts and the cobuaçu, way less sour than it was. This thing's delicious as a topping for ice cream, especially. Also, Brazil nut ice cream, amazing. And speaking of the importance of cassava, cassava ice cream. I never had cassava ice cream before. Wow, for the flavor, it's very aromatic, extremely milky and creamy. And inside there's little clumps of tapioca that provides a slight change in texture. This is really, really good. All right, so this restaurant, tell me about it. So, Nova Capella, one of the oldest restaurants in the city, opened in 1903. This is a family-run place, considered for a lot of people, one of the essential places to eat. We're gonna have some classic sort of Portuguese Brazilian food here. Let's go eat. This is the Belenho de Bacanau. This is the same dish that I got at the Mercado Municipal in Sao Paulo. But what they do here, and what I learned about this dish from Tom is that, so this dish I know has cod and potatoes, but the ratio is supposed to be 50-50. And most places give you way more potatoes than they give you cod. But here, you definitely can see the cod into potatoes and add some of the chilies. You can taste a huge difference from this than what I had a couple days ago. A couple days ago, I mean, it was delicious. Granted, that was like my first one. I mean, you do taste the cod, but mainly you're tasting potatoes. Here, you're mainly tasting the cod. Also, the shell is so beautifully crunched. Inside is soft, mushy potatoes, huge cod flavor, and all the cod is from Norway. So this is all Norwegian cod. Drizzle some olive oil on here. That's a trick I learned from a couple days ago. Love the chilies. I mean, the cod is savory, salty. Love the mushy potatoes and some other herbs and spices in here as well. All encasing this delightfully crunchy outer shell. That with the added aroma of the olive oil and the heat to kind of balance everything out. That's a freaking masterpiece. I love this dish so much and they definitely do it so well here. This dish is called Cabrito Asado, which means roast goat. But here, they're not using goat. They're using lamb, but it's called a roast goat. And it's served with some rice with broccolini and the roasted potatoes. The way they prepare this meat is really, really interesting. So apparently, they cook the whole lamb in low heat for hours till it's just melt-in-your-mouth tender. Then they take the meat and deep fry it. So all that fat and skin of the lamb is just insanely crispy. And I see different parts of the lamb here. I see some cartilage, a ton of fat. This is melt-in-your-mouth tender. The outside has a subtle crunchy texture, perfectly preserving the tender meat and all that juice on the inside. I just took a bite with some of the cartilage, which give it an extra crunch. The broccoli rice is really good. Very, very fragrant. Tiny hints of bitterness from the broccolini. That bitterness goes really well with the fattiness of the lamb. Now, of course, add some chilies to it. That makes it even better. Oh, and the potato is delicious as well. There's no gaminess to the lamb. What there is, is a lot of fat. And because they deep fried it, that is crunchy. It's toasty. It breaks apart on your tongue. That delicious flavor mixed with the awesome fragrant broccoli rice. This is an extraordinary dish. This is really interesting. So it's a bar restaurant and their seating is right where you would usually park cars. They just pull out some lawn chairs and this is where you sit. Nice. This is the table. Thank you. So this is Brazilian bar food. Here is basically an oxtail croquette with looks like some barbecue sauce and mustard sauce. Homemade soda. Very fruity. Oh, wow. God, I love this. First of all, croquette in this country, it's usually gonna be good. This thing, same delightfully crunchy skin on the outside. When I say crunchy, it is an earthquake shattering crunch inside. Potatoes mixed with that melt in your mouth oxtail, which is just a load of fat and collagen. Dunk it in some of that mustard sauce. This is dohesmo. Deep fried pork belly and fat and skin. Wow. Fatty, crunchy, savory, deep fried pieces of love. This stuff is fried absolutely perfect. Taste that with some of the soda. It's sour, so it goes very, very well with that fried pork belly. This is a very popular dish. Chicken hearts. Wow. That might be the best chicken heart I've ever had. I think I've only really had cumin barbecue chicken hearts, but it's never juicy like this. This is remarkably delicious. If you've never had heart before, it's such a delicate, pure-tasting muscle. They do it so well here. I mean, you taste all that delicious smoke. That char provides a little hint of bitterness. Oh, it's awesome. Giló. This is a Brazilian vegetable from the family of aubergine eggplants. And here it's like marinated and then we have like with pickled onions. And it's good if you have with a slice of bread. All right, so Brazilian eggplant. Oh, the eggplant is really smoky. A little bitter. Onions are nicely pickled. It's a nice dish to eat with all the other dishes, kind of balancing everything out. Something that's a little more acidic because everything else is more fried and savory and heavier. Nice little light addition. So this is Brazilian bar food and people just sit here and drink and eat. What we do is we drink until we get hungry and then we start to eat and then we can drink more. So apparently bar food here in Rio is huge and they all create new innovative dishes for some competition they have every once a year. And this bar, look at this. Doritos creamy cassava with cheese on top and the bottom here, the brown stuff, is shredded beef. Not sure exactly how to eat this or how to even approach it. Oh, look at that. Creamy cassava. I'm gonna get to the beef right down there. Oh, still creamy cassava. Haven't got to the beef. Oh, there's the beef. There it is. So I'm just gonna load that on my long Dorito chip. There it is. You know what? That's pretty darn good. It kind of tastes like shredded beef and grits, like more creamy grits. I mean it's cheesy, it's creamy. The beef is tender and delicious. This is a hefty, substantial dish. It is very heavy and this thing was sitting in my stomach for a little while, but it is delicious. This is definitely some bar food right here. This thing, oh my god, I could barely lift this. Oh, wow. It's a really outrageous drumstick. So outside is breadcrumbs, inside it's just a chicken leg rolled around with bechamel sauce and deep fried with breadcrumbs. The meat is really, really, really tender. But this thing, just like the last dish, wow, this is a substantial, very dense chicken like that. I think it weighs close to a pound. It's really good. These dishes are definitely made to soak up the alcohol in the body. This is another fried croquette. Look at this. Fried on the outside, stuffed with rice, ham, cheese. Oh, wow. Bar food in this country is no joking around. These items are aggressive every single way. They're heavy, they're dense, they're greasy, they're delicious. Whether you've been drinking or not, you're gonna like eating this. This looks like a scotch egg. A little sauce. And this scotch egg, if you notice on the outside, it's the salted cod. So it's kind of like a baklava scotch egg. This is my favorite one. Really gooey eggs. And again, this place as well, you definitely taste a cod fish. I was looking for this. Wow, this is gonna make it so much better. Slash that on the scotch egg. Oh, you think I added too much? I think it's just right. No way. No way? I'll show you. Perfect. I think I need a little more. Add some olive oil. This one's delicious. It's so nice. That's a satisfying pre-dinner dinner. This dinner is really, really cool. This is Otto, which is his restaurant right there, Otto. And this gentleman recreated a traditional cooking method of cooking the heart of palm, which was what the indigenous Indians here used to do. So this dish that was created the proper way, 150 years ago, is recreated now. They used to cook it with honey. It's cooked in the oven. It's served in this box. And then there's different parts of it. So Otto was separating the heart from the trunks. Onto the plate, salt, olive oil, some parsley, it looks like. And there it is, whole heart of palm on a plate. Obrigado. Thank you. Thank you. These parts is the heart and then trunk. The trunk, and that looks like what you typically find on the salad bars. This is so cool. Never knew where this actually looked like. I'm sure a lot of people have had heart of palm. I'm sure not a lot of us knew exactly where it kind of came from or what it looked like before it was served on a plate or pickled in a jar. Delicioso. Oh, obrigado. Oh my gosh. This is crazy good. Again, I'm pretty ignorant about heart of palm. I've had it from a jar. I've had it on salad bars. Never had it fresh like this. And it is so amazingly delicious. There's a hint of sweetness. It falls apart, melts on your tongue like butter. And it leaves this very aromatic, amazing aftertaste. That's a mix between buttery and fruity and juicy as well. This is nothing like you would taste on a buffet. Just think about the best tasting asparagus slash maybe artichoke that you ever had. This is it. And that little sweetness that's inside as well. It's almost borderline refreshing. This the trunk. I think the trunk's a little tiny bit more savory. It's like the best part of asparagus and artichoke times a hundred. Wow. Amazing. I could see this being really good with honey or something sweet as well. This is just such a treat. I'm almost enjoying this more than the Brazilian barbecue I had. So good. Last meal of the day, barbecue. This barbecue is happening on the rooftop of a building. Wow. Something smells really, really good. So on top of this restaurant on the roof, they've got a barbecue set up where they're grilling everything from hot stone plates of cheese, to the eggplant we had earlier, to what looks like little buns with stuffed sausages with chimichurri on top. Everything is grilled over an open wood fire. And this thing, chimichurri sauce on the eggplant as well. Freshly eggplant with a slight bit of bitterness. Ever so smoky with that open fire. That's so juicy and delicious. A little bun with cheese inside, sausage, chimichurri on top. This is awesome. There's all kinds of pillory and soft in the area. And inside, it's not cheese, it's some sort of garlic butter. Smoky sausage on top of that. Then chimichurri to add more fragrance, aroma, garlicky flavor, and a touch of citrus. This is a little grilled vegetable medley. Some potatoes, sweet potato, potato, pumpkin, and machiche, which is a vegetable that's kind of like a cucumber that we had earlier. Again, all covered in their chimichurri sauce. And that's one thing that is so different between US and Brazil. And I didn't mention this when I was presenting barbecue. The chimichurri is so different here. It is mind-blowingly good. And here, their chimichurri sauce, tons of garlic. Potatoes, delicious. Try the machiche. That thing is so good grilled. Oh, everything is good. The pumpkin. Vegetables are fresh and delicious. And that chimichurri and that smoke just ties everything together. Unbelievable. Oh, taller than a skyscraper. Look how thick this is. This is a thick, thick, smoky cut of beef. Oh, it smells so good. And look at this thing. This thing, before it even went on the grill, was covered in chimichurri butter. And then as it's being cooked, more butter and chimichurri has been added to this fine piece of steak. Again, everything's cooked in an open wood fire grill. Some chimichurri on the side. And this is a corn and onion combo. Wow. This thing is hella juicy. And I noticed this country, they really don't ask you how you want your steak cooked. And it's usually all coming out pretty rare. Dunk it in more chimichurri. That is some of the best steak you'll ever put in your mouth. Wow. That's so good. I mean, not only is this steak just amazingly smoky. With the added chimichurri, you got the additional aroma from the oil. Oh, garlic. So much herbs in here as well. What I love about their chimichurri, the vinegar. A little bit of yummy umami filled acid to cut into the fat and the meat. Look at the fat. The fat is all nice and charred. Goes through your mouth and just does a disappearing act and melts. The smoke is so ever present in this steak. And I know that like steaks, a little salt and pepper or just some salt, pretty much all you need. But when you do add more flavor, when you cover it with the chimichurri, when you dip it into the chimichurri, it tastes like a food dream you never want to wake up from. And try some of this little corn. Almost tastes like breadcrumbs. There's fried onions in here. A little sweet from the corn. I've had a lot of steaks in my day. This is unlike anything I've had before. It's just absurd flavor of it all. It's just breathtaking. They told me this is a piece of cowboy steak. We just asked for the best looking steak in there and this is what came out. If you're ever in Brazil, gotta try a steakhouse. This is not even a steakhouse. This is a barbecue place. But trust me, over wood, fire, all that smoke. You need that. You do. This is Natalie. She owns this barbecue place. It's amazing. The chimichurri too. It's so good. My partner is Argentinian. So the chimichurri comes from Zimbabwe. Oh, it's so good. This is one of the best steaks ever. It's so good. Thank you so much. This has been an awesome food day here in Rio. Saw a traditional market with vegetables and fruits. Had some bar food. The heart of palm. That was spectacular to see. And finally, awesome, awesome barbecue. And thanks guys for taking me around. That was awesome. I'll put Tom's information down below. If you are ever in Rio, you want to find a food guide, Tom's great at that. So Eat Rio. I'll put all that information down below for you guys. Thank you all so much for watching. Until we eat again, see you later.